Worlds Apart: Social Policy Regimes in Latin America

The region of Latin America exhibits significant diversity with regard to the size and scope of social protection programs. In this article, I propose a new way of measuring a country’s “social policy regime,” moving past expenditure-based conceptions of welfare provision to incorporate the coverage of programs. Employing this new measure, I use cluster analysis to demonstrate that Latin American social policy regimes cluster into four distinct categories. I then employ the comparative historical method to test a theory of why countries fall into each of these four categories. The analysis provides evidence that a country’s record of industrialization, the nature of political incorporation, and levels of ethnic and racial diversity are key determinants of the size and scope of Latin America’s social policy regimes.     

Classifying Political Regimes in Latin

This article is about how political regimes should generally be classified, and how Latin American regimes should be classified for the 1945–99 period. We make five general claims about regime classification. First, regime classification should rest on sound concepts and definitions. Second, it should be based on explicit and sensible coding and aggregation rules. Third, it necessarily involves some subjective judgments. Fourth, the debate about dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy creates a false dilemma. Neither democratic theory, nor coding requirements, nor the reality underlying democratic practice compel either a dichotomous or a continuous approach in all cases. Fifth, dichotomous measures of democracy fail to capture intermediate regime types, obscuring variation that is essential for studying political regimes. This general discussion provides the grounding for our trichotomous ordinal scale, which codes regimes as democratic, semi-democratic or authoritarian in nineteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 1999. Our trichotomous classification achieves greater differentiation than dichotomous classifications and yet avoids the need for massive information that a very fine-grained measure would require.     

Demilitarisation in Latin America

Since the mid 1970s relations between the USA and Libya have been antagonistic. The radical policies the regime of Muammar Qadaaffi has pursued have made Libya one of the USA's bêtes noires . The reasons for US antagonism derive from Libya's repression at home, its alleged support for terrorism and for radical movements opposed to US interests, its staunch opposition to Israel, and its anti-Western rhetoric. Libya's hostility towards the USA rests on a perception of the USA as a global power intent on maintaining its hegemony and control over the Arab and Islamic world. Libyans have been resentful of US support of Israel to the detriment of Arabs and Muslims. Libya's resolute opposition to the USA especially in the 1980s, resulted in a series of military confrontations. The USA has maintained sanctions despite the suspension of UN sanctions on Libya in 1999. The USA has retained Libya on its short list of 'rogue states' despite recognition that Libya has stopped sponsoring terrorism. The contention here is that Libya, like the other 'rogue states', provides justification for US domestic policies (eg National Missile Defense). Given the events of 11 September 2001 in the US, it is quite conceivable that Libya could become a target of the US antiterrorism campaign. The USA could at last find valid justification for the removal of the Qadaffi regime.     

The Presidentialist Tradition in Latin America

Abstract

The diffusion of presidentialism to Latin America has led to its distortion. The North American constitutional pattern, termed presidentialism under separation of powers and its most distinguishing feature, presidential leadership, while modeled in Latin America, has rarely led to democratic–constitutional government a la the United States. The institution of the presidency in Latin America is also typical for nondemocratic regimes in the region. One of the most widely accepted and widely professed facts in Latin American politics is the dominant role of the president but, curiously, most discussions of presidentialism are limited to the US and comparisons with Great Britain. Few studies of Latin American chief executives lend shape to the corpus of scholarly literature, despite the region's long experience and ejecutivismo. The gap, and this article, should be taken as a stimulus for more systematic explication, analysis, and research.     

Privatization in Asia and Latin America

This article analyzes the political and economic predictors of privatization in 17 developing countries in Asia and Latin America, using an OLS regression model with panel-corrected standard errors and data from 1988 to 1999. The regression results show that two factors, which, have hitherto been either neglected or underemphasized in the privatization literature, play a crucial role in the pace and scope of, privatization. The first is a government’s revenue needs (defined in terms of interest payments on public debt as a percentage of a government’s total budget expenditures). An unsustainable interest burden leads to a significant reduction in the social and public spending of a government. This, in turn, impels incumbents to raise revenues through the sale of, state assets. The second factor that explains privatization patterns is the extant degree of, political opportunity (defined in terms of the governing politicians’ legislative strength and their security to remain in office). In addition, the results show that privatization is associated, with declining inflation and economic growth rates.     

The Cost of Discrimination in Latin America

Indigenous and linguistic minorities are in an inferior economic and social position. The ethnic concentration of inequality is increasingly being recognized in the literature. In this review, studies from six Latin American countries that estimate the costs to an individual of being an economic minority are reviewed. The studies decompose the overall earnings gap into two components. One is the portion attributable to differences in the endowments of income-generating characteristics (“explained” differences) and the other is attributable to differences in the returns that majority and minority workers receive for the same endowment of income-generating characteristics (“unexplained”). This latter component is often taken as reflecting the “upper bound” of wage discrimination. In two studies for Bolivia, one using a 1966 survey and the other a 1989 survey, decomposition of the differential between indigenous and nonindigenous earnings leads to the conclusion that most of the overall differential is due to productivity. In Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, only one-half of the earnings differential can be attributed to differences in productivity-enhancing characteristics. In Paraguay, decomposition of the overall earnings differential between monolingual Spanish speakers and Guaraní speakers shows that most of the differential is explained by human capital differences. In Brazil, however, there is a significant cost to “being non-white.” Harry Anthony Patrinos is a Senior Education Economist at the World Bank. He leads the Economics of Education Thematic Group and manages EdInvest (www.worldbank.org/edinvest), the Education Investment Information Facility. He is co-author ofDecentralization of Education: Demand-Side Financing (1997). His latest co-edited book isPolicy Analysis of Child Labor: A Comparative Study (St. Martin's Press, 1999).Indigenous People and Poverty in Latin America: An Empirical Analysis (edited with George Psacharopoulos), was one of the first studies of the socioeconomic situation of indigenous peoples in Latin America.     

The process of democratization in Latin America

During the 1980s, Latin America experienced the longest and deepest wave of democratization in its history. The origins of this process of transformation are to be found in the interaction between domestic and international forces. At the international level, the key events were the oil shocks of the 1970s, the related expansion of international lending, and the subsequent debt crisis. The speed and extent to which these changes were translated into democratization were conditioned by the political alignments of the private sector and structural fragilities of authoritarianism at the national level. The persistence of the democratization trend through time reflects the importance of other factors, including global political change, the receding threat of the revolutionary left, the internationalization of capital markets, constraints on domestic policy choice, and political learning, which have converged at the domestic level to reduce the incentives and opportunities for authoritarian reversals.     

Economic Growth and Convergence in Latin America

Little is known about the convergence process among developing countries in general and in Latin America in particular. For the period as a whole there is no evidence of a narrowing in the cross-country dispersion of income (sigma convergence). But there is evidence of convergence to different steady state income levels at a speed that is common to all countries (conditional beta convergence). The article also shows that the estimates of convergence are sensitive to the way in which GDP per capita is measured.     

Reflections on rural violence in Latin America

In recent decades rural violence has escalated in many Latin American countries. Although there is a growing body of literature on the topic, there exist as yet few comparative studies. While there are undoubtedly multiple and evolving causes of violence, this exploratory article focuses on the relationship between sociopolitical violence and agrarian structure and state policy. Particular attention is paid to the impact of agrarian reform and counter-reform experiences on rural conflicts and violence. A contrast is also drawn with countries which have not undergone any significant land reform. The cases discussed are Chile, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and several Central American countries (Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador). The complexity of rural violence is demonstrated and the case for further comparative studies is argued, so as to advance our knowledge on the causes, consequences and resolution of violence.